Meghan McCain is certain the reason many people in the Republican Party lack respect for her is that she is a moderate Republican. “I’m a proud moderate Republican, but moderate in the current Republican party is a dirty word,” she told Al Sharpton today, asserting that this was a “scary time” politically for her, and she could not “understand the popularity of Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart.”

In a panel discussion on President Barack Obama’s attacks institution of Wall Street in his campaign, Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein said that Wall Street traders who have turned against Obama as a result of his rhetoric are “thinned-skinned.” The MSNBC panel said that Wall Streeters should be grateful that their industry was not nationalized and financial professionals were not locked into “stockades” in the wake of the crash of 2008.

Ed Schultz hosted a fairly full panel today on a fairly incendiary topic: the birther movement and how Republicans appear to have, at least on some state levels, adopted elements of the far right into the establishment. The discussion on whether the birther movement was representative of the mainstream Republican Party went pretty smoothly, with most of the panel agreeing that some fusion had taken place. Then conservative talk show host Steve Deace mentioned the President’s jobs record, and all four people on TV started shouting at each other simultaneously.

“The most famous plumber in the country” is unhappy with Vice President Joe Biden‘s comments that being a private businessman doesn’t qualify you to be president any more than being a plumber. For some reason, Samuel “Joe The Plumber” Wurzelbacher chose as a venue to air his grievances PoliticsNation, where he found more common ground than one would expect with Al Sharpton about the fundamentally flawed tax code.

On Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz topped his CNN 8pm competition, Anderson Cooper’s AC360 in both demo and total viewers. With his 177,000 demo numbers, Schultz’s The Ed Show had more viewers than CNN and HLN’s entire programming block between 5pm and 11pm.

In March and April, MSNBC’s primetime hosts ran with nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. They regularly suggested that the lack of national interest in the case was worthy of outrage. Last week, when an avalanche of new evidence favorable to George Zimmerman came to light, MSNBC’s primetime lineup didn’t just bury the story, they didn’t mention Martin or Zimmerman once the week that news broke according to media monitoring service TV Eyes.

A new survey from Farleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds that people who watch no news at all can answer more questions about international current events than people who watch cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC. The survey also finds that Fox News viewers are the worst-informed on domestic and international current events, while NPR listeners are the best-informed.

On Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, the eponymous host took issue with his panel going into an off-topic debate about the role of government, lecturing them to “stop it” and to talk about those things “on another TV show,” before calming down and returning to the conversation Ratigan so desired.

Ann Coulter has been making headlines with incendiary statements for the better part of a decade, and 2006 was no exception– at the time, she had condemned the use of 9/11 victims to promote policies in a way that benefited liberals. That year, she visited The Situation with Tucker Carlson for two segments, to elaborate on her comments and her point that using victims of suffering as experts on policy was misguided. As a rebuttal, Carlson had The Situation regular and Air America host Rachel Maddow on after, to attempt to make sense of liberal ire against Coulter.

On Monday’s edition of Morning Joe, New York Magazine contributing editor Benjamin Wallace-Wells discussed his new article on the lessons Mitt Romney learned from his father George’s failed 1968 Republican primary campaign. Wells posited that, in some ways, the current presumptive Republican nominee is more like Richard Nixon than George Romney, especially in how he has handled the current rightward shift in the conservative base.

Watching the prim, polished Rachel Maddow show as it exists today– MSNBC’s flagship– it’s hard to recall the days Rachel Maddow was a radio host first and foremost, with some gigs on TV on the side. Her first regular stint on national television was on The Situation with Tucker Carlson– a news opinion program that preceded both Wolf Blitzer‘s The Situation Room and Jersey Shore‘s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, and eventually became simply Tucker, giving way to a series of programs before ceding the 9PM MSNBC spot to Maddow herself.

Usually in the business of chronicling cable news, a debate on austerity and inflation is a pretty hard sell. In a world of Jeremiah Wrights and Sandra Flukes, the Euro crisis is rather low on the personal drama scale. This morning’s Melissa Harris-Perry shattered that conventional wisdom, with The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein and Reason‘s Nick Gillespie going head-to-head on the woes of the Eurozone and whether the nations should continue to spend money, the sort of crosstalk-laden panel discussion host Melissa Harris-Perry had to interrupt to remind them to keep the audience in the loop.

It is 2012 and the nation faces a brand new presidential election, but somehow Rev. Jeremiah Wright has become, once again, a focal point in the campaign, due in some part to a Super PAC proposal the New York Times dug up suggesting hammering that point into the political consciousness of voters. On last night’s Ed Show, host Ed Schultz argued the fairness and relevance of bringing up Wright again, and how Mitt Romney may be exposing himself to attack over his Mormon faith if he allows his campaign to go after Wright.

On Friday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd asked Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels whether he’d consider to participate should Mitt Romney select him as a vice-presidential candidate. Daniels shut down any potential rumors, insisting he is not interested in being vice-president, and that everyone should “make some easy money and bet against this whole idea.”

Watching the prim, polished Rachel Maddow show as it exists today– MSNBC’s flagship– it’s hard to think of the days Rachel Maddow was a radio host first and foremost, with some gigs on TV on the side. Her first regular stint on national television was on The Situation with Tucker Carlson– a news opinion program that preceded both Wolf Blitzer‘s The Situation Room and Jersey Shore‘s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, and eventually became simply Tucker, giving way to a series of programs before ceding the 9PM MSNBC spot to Maddow herself.